Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
He doesn’t want peace with me. He told me so himself, in the plainest words a man has available to him, across the width of my father’s old desk. Peace isn’t on the table. The only things on the table are a child and an exit, plus a tidy itemized list of all the ways I can be cut out of my own baby’s life if I put a single foot wrong. And you cannot make peace by yourself. Peace takes two people who both want the fighting to stop, and my husband doesn’t want it to stop. He wants to win, and somewhere in the last two months he’s decided that I am the thing he’s winning against.
But I don’t want to die, either.
That’s the plain animal fact of it, sitting there underneath all the heartbreak when I dig down far enough. I’m twenty-two years old. I’ve lost my father and I appear to have lost my marriage, and I am not, on top of all of that, prepared to go and lose my actual life to a heart that was never built to take the strain. Dr. Meyers said take it easy. So I will take it easy. And if taking it easy means making my own private kind of peace in a place where no real peace is on offer, then that is exactly what I’ll do. I’ll make it on the inside, quietly, where Trey doesn’t get a say and can’t refuse to sign.
I’ll take it easy, I tell myself that same night, when I hear his key turn in the lock.
And taking it easy, right now, tonight, in this bed, means the only thing it can possibly mean. It means pretending. It means lying still when he comes to me in the dark and letting myself believe, just for the length of it, that he still loves me the way I once was so sure he did. It costs me nothing he hasn’t already taken from me, and it might cost me everything if I let the truth in while my heart is doing the uneven stumbling thing it’s started doing, so I shut the door on the truth and I let the pretending carry me off.
He kisses me awake the way he always does, and I let the old story write itself right over the top of the new one. This is my husband, who chose me, I tell myself as his mouth finds mine in the dark. This is the man who had four blankets delivered before I’d finished saying I was cold, who read me the worst of the sports pages in that terrible deadpan until I laughed, who held me through every ugly night after Dad. I pour all of it into the dark behind my closed eyes and I let it gild him head to foot, and when he gathers me in against him I let myself pretend the gathering still means what it used to mean, that I am wanted and not merely used, cherished and not merely required to produce.
He takes me the way he always has, like a man with something to prove and no patience at all for proving it slowly, and I answer him the way I always have, because my body has never once learned how not to. But tonight I fold the lie in on purpose, the way you’d stir sugar into something that’s gone bitter, and for a little while it actually works. For a little while, with my eyes shut and his heartbeat going under my palm, I can almost taste the marriage I thought I had. I can almost let myself believe that the man moving over me in the dark would, if only I asked him to, stay.
I don’t ask him. I’ve learned at least that much.
And when it’s over and he rises in the dark to dress, I keep my eyes shut and my breathing slow and even, and I tell myself a brand-new lie to replace the one that’s just worn out, and the new lie goes like this: he’s only leaving because he’s coming down with something. I heard him cough this morning over his coffee. He doesn’t want to pass it to me, not now, not when I need to keep well for the baby we’re trying so hard to make. That’s all this is. A considerate husband sparing his delicate wife a fever in the night. I build the whole small shelter of it in the time it takes him to find his shirt in the dark and button it, and I crawl all the way inside, and I almost, almost don’t hear the door close behind him.
That is how I learn to take it easy, and it turns out I have a real talent for it. It goes on like this for two months.